Options for Publishing Programming Education Materials

Question

I'm working on a programming class through the Twin Cities Experimental College. I'd like to publish the curriculum materials, and I'm open for ideas about how to do so.

Pluses:

• collaborative editing
• CC license
• some sense of "book"-ness
• able to easily format code (python, specifically)

I don't want to manage the server myself.

The options I've seen so far:

• Google Docs
• Wikibooks

I'm quite open to others! I don't care about money, or paper publishing or any of that.

Answer 1

This is perhaps not a direct answer to your question, although there are a lot of ways to do what you are trying to do, but here is some information that may spark some ideas, or head you in the right direction for some aspects of your project:

I would check out the book The Pragmatic-Programmer - From Journeyman to Master as well as the website http://www.pragprog.com/write-for-us to see how the pragmatic programmer series has evolved and their model for writing and publishing; even though this is a for-profit business, the publishing (defined differently in your case), formatting, updating code samples that are tested and accurate, and maintaining version control on your work is very useful. The book I mentioned covers a decent amount of information that would help a publishing author, or even a student writing a report.

Answer 2

Some other options:

• A Google Site - Google Sites have a "Blockquote Code" format option but you won't get any colorization (it's basically just a monospaced font).
• An XWiki hosted instance - XWiki has a code macro with python syntax highlighting support.

EDIT: I've added some details about syntax highlighting support as per request.